and he's not even that smart. i mean, i love him. but he's normal smart. just he wanted to, so i bought some stupid book, and three months later, hello second grade reading level.

i honestly thought i wouldn't be a competitive asshole of a parent. my parents really pushed me up the "prestige/money" path because they didn't have choices. i ended up miserable. i just want my kids to be happy, good people.

i probably am a competitive asshole deep down. but it's also hard. cause like, while i think i'm completely fine with him choosing to be a starving artist, it sure as hell better not be because i failed him in some way. so out come the music lessons. the sports, the overpriced, nurturing play-based pre-school, the constant enrichment. it's this cycle you buy into even if you don't want to.

wonder how much of my parents' pressure cooking path to misery was the same thing.

fool proof. the few bad reviews claim that it's dry. and sure. but parents who can't animate and cheerleader a toddler through fifteen minutes of dryness each day are kind of lame. i just got really excited/proud of him, pulled out the voices, and bought an $11 pack of 100 mini dinosaurs on amazon and let him pick one out after we finished every lesson, with the super cool dinosaur backpack they were stored in, his "i'm a reader" present at the end.

bob books are also good to roll out around lesson 20, since they're easy enough, and the pride of reading a whole book by yourself is huge.

but seriously. learning to read is easier than i thought. lesson 12 is when your kid first reads a sentence. less than 3 weeks of 12-20 minute lessons most days. insane. and the more they do, the easier it is to keep going, because they feel pretty awesome about it.

2) made sense, because he's just not ready, fine motor skills wise. also, the book is a little obnoxious about handwriting. for example, it teaches the lowercase "a" isn't the one that everyone learns in school, but the one in this type font, with the dorky hat. stuff like that that was confusing/pointless.

first. it's not "reading" it's reading. like he's legit working through the boxcar children now. i can't spell words so he won't understand anymore. he's reading.

second, the point is that it's kind of not an accomplishment. i did think the book was pretty amazing in making learning to read so straightforward. but that's what it did. pretty sure 90% of three year olds could be taught to read the same way. the whole post was more a comment about my turning into a shitty specimen of parenthood.

also, just practicing the obnoxiousness here, before i let it drop casually to parents on the park bench.

not a parentmo but think that a parent can give his kid opportunities without it being striverish tiger parenting

whenever i was interested in pursuing something as a kid my parents supported and encouraged it but they didn't really encourage much on their own. i turned out nicely but in retrospect i wish they had done a little more encouraging / guided me towards some shit that i never got involved in.

in any case if he's reading that soon he probably likes it. encourage it in a way that makes it satisfying and exciting for him.

and encouraging this isn't necessarily encouraging striving for money/prestige. if he's smart then you can trust him to do what he finds satisfying. know plenty of smart people who were brought up in umc families who are now in academia or teaching high school or doing some other weird shit. give him chances to explore a lot of shit and if he's a high-iqmo then he'll get into stuff and figure out what he likes on his own.

that said as a non-parentmo idk if reading at that age is really an amazing feat.

sure i would have and do agree with all of this in the hypothetical. i was going to be exactly this parent.

it's just harder in the moment. there's a lot of gray area between scheduling his (or rather your, since you'll never leave his side) every moment, and letting him figure out the traffic rules by abandoning him on a busy street.

i guess i wish i was just more chill. it's annoying to register and internally compare every time little lisa and prodigy bart are talked about. i didn't appreciate, before being a parent, that it's not just "Oh no, he's not doing that yet" which I think I could quiet and be fine with, but "Oh no, he's not doing that yet. What did I fuck up?" And that's the part that makes me crazy.

It's an interesting question because most parents seem to be shitty, but parenting doesn't look that hard from the outside.

IDK, it just sorta seems to me that parents aren't all that considerate, or something... like they don't really think about their kids in an adequately loving way. This sounds severe, but it's "what it looks like" to me.